moodagent
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Moodagent 2.0: A great app becomes awesome
A good number of us at TUAW love Syntonetic's Moodagent app; it creates instant playlists around a mood you select, fitting the music to your state of mind. We reviewed it in December, and caught up with Syntonetic's president Richard French at Macworld who told me that the app had created profiles for over 30 million songs and has had over 1 billion songs requested. I gave him a laundry list of feature requests. He told me that most if not all of my suggestions would be incorporated into the app in the next 3-6 months. True to his word, and right on schedule, Moodagent 2.0 is out including all my requests and a lot more. Richard seems to be passionate about listening to his user base and determined to give them what they want. Moodagent creates genius mixes from your iPhone/iPod touch or iPad music libraries (it requires iPhone OS 3.0 or better). The mood is based on 4 sliders representing emotions (Sensual, Tender, Happy, Angry) and a fifth for Tempo. You move the sliders up or down depending upon your mood and an instant mix is generated either automatically, or based upon a "seed" song of your choosing. Since Macworld, the number of songs requested has risen to well over 2 billion and counting. Moodagent is now 2 apps, a free one that in version 2.0 is supported by advertising, and a paid app (US $4.99), with the only difference being that the paid version doesn't have any advertising and allows you to see one more song on the screen. That's it. Read on to find out about all the changes.
Macworld 2010: Moodagent has synced over one billion songs
In December we reviewed Moodagent [iTunes Link] a wonderful music app that puts you in control of creating Genius like playlists of your iTunes library. On release it didn't recognize about 20% of my library, but now, after analyzing over one billion songs, I find it to be about 95% accurate, and getting better all time. I spoke with Richard French, the CEO of Syntonetic Inc., the parent company of Moodagent, who gave me an update on what's in store for the app and if you like it now, you're going to love it in 3 - 6 months. On the front burner is an iTunes plug-in which has been the most requested feature. I can easily see this completely replacing Genius playlists by putting you in the drivers seat when using iTunes on your computer. I asked about the possibility of importing Moodagent playlists into iTunes and found that it's going to be difficult since the easy way would by necessity stomp all over some Apple proprietary code, but it's not impossible and it's going to happen this year. It will just take a lot of work and time. Another upcoming feature is integration of social networking so you can share your playlists on Facebook, Twitter and all the usual suspects. The limit of a 25 song playlist will eventually be raised, which would be my first request. This will is also on the drawing board and will be gotten to eventually. It was interesting to learn a bit of how Moodagent works. Recent musicology graduates in Copenhagen sample songs during syncing and process them through 50 expert filters adding to the songs that Moodagent recognizes. They constantly work on improving the filters to make Moodagent more accurate. There is no tagging going on behind the scenes. Moodagent is a great app now but after my discussion, I can see it being incredible about half a year from now. I can't wait.
Moodagent: Going iTunes Playlists one better
Moodagent [iTunes Link] (free for now) puts a new spin on the iTunes Genius Playlist system. Instead of leaving it up to Apple to give you category based Genius Playlists, Moodagent, gives you some control over what songs will appear in a 25 song customizable playlist of your music. You are given 5 colored bars, each with an icon representing an aspect of music. The symbols didn't make much sense to me, but by hitting an info button, I found that the icons represented, in order: Sensual, Tender, Joy, Aggressive and Tempo. I could have used a full explanation of what they meant by Aggressive and Tempo, but trial and error gave me a rough idea. By increasing or decreasing the size of each of the bars, a 25 song Playlist is created, complete with cover art icons, that can be played or saved for later recall. Increase or decrease one or more of the bars and the playlist instantly changes, so if you like a playlist, it's a good idea to save it before changing anything. Once saved, a tap will play your chosen playlist. When saving, you are also given the opportunity to title the playlist any way you like, with the first song being the default title. Another way of making a playlist, again similar to the iTunes Genius playlist, is to select a seed song to base the list upon. Choose one song and then adjust the bars to tailor the list to your liking. When first loading the app, you run a sync that indexes all the music on your iPhone/iPod touch running OS 3.0 or better, with their server. My iPhone has about 2100 songs on it and syncing took about 10 minutes. When done, I was told that it couldn't sync about 750 songs. This wasn't surprising since my tastes tend toward the arcane, but there's a solution for that. You are asked to download a Moodagent Profiler application that, as does iTunes Genius playlists, upload anonymous information from the iTunes library on your computer, which is assumed to have more music on it than does your mobile device. This information is used to expand the Moodagent database. After running the Moodagent Profiler on my roughly 6100 song Macbook Pro iTunes library, which took over an hour, I re-synced Moodagent and this time the number of songs that couldn't be synced reduced to 149. So why didn't it find 149 songs?
